]]>Nearly every single smartphone sold last year uses a processor originally designed by ARM. On Tuesday, the British company announced new processor designs that will likely end up in devices in 2016.

ARM announced a new CPU chip design and a new GPU chip design. The new CPU is going to be called the Cortex A72, and it should replace the Cortex A15 and Cortex A57 as the “big” CPU for high-performance smartphones and tablets.

Remember that ARM encourages its customers — chipmakers — to lay out its processor cores in what it calls a “Big.Little” configuration. Fast and power-hungry cores handle jobs when single-core performance is important, and other tasks are delegated to the “little” core, which uses less power. The A72 will be a “big” core for most of ARM’s customers, and will likely be paired with the A52 design as its “little.”

Currently, devices sporting ARM’s A57 design are just starting to hit the market, usually in devices with a Qualcomm Snapdragon 810 chip. Many of last year’s high-end devices are using the A15. According to ARM, the A72 boasts performance 3.5 times better than the A15. More importantly for mobile devices, the A72 will use 75 percent less energy as the A15 on the same workload and will integrate with ARM’s other designs such as those for GPUs, display controllers, and video controllers.

“For our customers that do want to take all the pieces, it will all glue together and will be optimized in a very good way,” Ian Ferguson, ARM VP for marketing, said.

ARM says it’s optimized the A72 design to be fabricated on TSMC’s 16nm process, although other fabs — like Samsung, which is bragging about a new 14nm process — will also be able to produce the design. Ten chipmakers have already licensed the A72 design, including MediaTek, Rockchip, and High Silicon. The A72 is a 64-bit chip but 32-bit apps can run on it without modification.

ARM’s new GPU design is called Mali-T880, and it promises nearly double the performance of the Mali-T760, which is included in devices on sale today, while using 40 percent less energy on the same jobs. There’s also a new security feature called Trustzone, which eliminates backdoors for devices decrypting streamed 4K content.

“If studios are going to trust the streaming of data to these devices at the same time premium content is appearing in theaters, that content has to be secured,” Ferguson said. “With Trustzone, as the information comes down in encrypted form on the handset, it will go to the display without any backdoors to pull off that content and use it in other ways.”

ARM believes that mobile GPUs will soon be used for certain non-graphics computational tasks like speech recognition locally on smartphones. “We’re approaching the time for [general processing] GPU computing. That world is coming,” Ferguson said.

Unfortunately, although these new designs are available today, ARM hasn’t discussed specific technical details, but promises that information is coming in April.

]]>Amazon has indeed agreed to purchase Annapurna Labs, a super-stealthy Israeli company that is reportedly working on new chip technology. Talks were first reported in Israeli financial newspaper Calcalist and picked up by Reuters and others.

Annapurna Labs was privately owned by Avigdor Willenz, who founded Marvell Semiconductor in 1992, with additional investment from ARM, the British chip maker and Walden International a VC firm, according to the original report. The purchase price was reportedly $350 million.

is a cutting-edge technology startup, established in 2011 by industry veterans. We are well funded, with sites in Israel and Silicon Valley. We are operating in stealth mode and can’t share much about our company, but we’re hiring on an exclusive basis, seeking smart, aggressive, multi-disciplinary engineers and business folks, with focus on teamwork in a group of highly talented team.

It would make sense for Amazon to invest in cutting-edge chip technology given that its Amazon Web Services arm is always in the hunt for faster, more efficient infrastructure.

]]>Microsoft is quietly working on a version of Windows Server operating system to run on ARM-based servers, according to a Bloomberg news report.

Windows Server now runs on Intel hardware although that was not always the case. Oldsters remember that there was once a version of Windows Server for PowerPC-based machines although it was discontinued in 1997. PowerPC was a RISC chip architecture backed by IBM, Apple and Motorola as a hedge against Intel chip dominance.

]]>When it launched its Kickstarter campaign last November, Kano, a $150 computer comprised of a Raspberry Pi, Wi-Fi, Bluetooth and a speaker, was marketed as a DIY computer for kids and people went wild. The campaign raised over $1.5 million — a significant jump from its ambitious $100,000 goal — and was written up in a variety of tech publications from Wired to our own.

Today, the Kano is available for anyone to buy, so for those wondering if now is the time to get their tyke a computer, my eight-year-old daughter and I tested the device over the last two weeks. Most of our experience came on the front end of opening and building the machine, with little time left for gameplay owing to heavy homework schedules and some out-of-town guests.

The short of it is if you are looking for a kid-friendly computer that reminds you of the programmability of the Commodore 64, then the Kano is a bargain. If you are looking for an actual computer or content creation device like for homework or internet research, this may be a bit of a stretch.

Building the machine

I used to help my dad build our computers back in the late 1980s and knew more about motherboards, processors and NIC cards than most adults at the time. It influenced my love of technology, which led me to my current job and helped me feel comfortable in what many perceived as some kind of guy or geeky world. So being able to turn to my daughter one Saturday afternoon and ask, “Do you want to build a computer?” and have her eyes light up and hear say, “Sure!” would have caused me to shell out the $149.99 right there on the spot.

“OMG, Mom, it looks like Minecraft!”

But even if you aren’t nostalgic, spending an hour of time building and setting up the Kano is a fun way to interact with your kid. When we opened the box my daughter exclaimed, “OMG, Mom, it looks like Minecraft!” before ripping the outside off and staring at the orange keyboard with delight. The first thing we pulled out was the instruction booklet, which laid out the steps of assembling the Kano in clean, kid-friendly instructions.

While we were pulling out the motherboard and snapping the case around it, I tried to tell her just a bit about what each part was. This was stupid of me. She just wanted to build it so she could see what it did. I was turning something fun into something lame. I stopped.

She expressed some frustration when inserting some of the USB cables and connecting the speakers because she felt like she couldn’t do it right (she wasn’t pushing hard enough on the USB and the speaker connectors intimidated her), but with a bit of an assist from me and encouragement, she managed. She complained that she didn’t feel like she was building the machine, but once we were ready to plug it in she proudly told her dad that she had built it, so I think she forgave my help.

Up and running … sort of

Now building the Kano was not like building computers with my dad, when we would actually solder stuff onto a board. This was more like plugging in a bunch of components when your desktop arrived, but it still got my daughter to feel like this was something she could do. We did plug the speaker in the wrong way, but we simply took it apart and fixed it after my daughter looked at the instructions again to see what was wrong.

I liked that the computer ran us through a testing scenario once it was set up and turned on. I didn’t like that the bluetooth keyboard wasn’t charged so we had some issues with controlling it during setup, which frustrated my daughter. We took a break to charge the keyboard and resumed setup later. You should probably read the last few pages of the instruction book (I didn’t) to avoid needless confusion if the keyboard gets glitchy.

You need a spare HDMI monitor or TV to plug the Kano into and it is much slower than your typical laptop since it’s running a 32-bit ARM-based processor on the Raspberry Pi. However, it has decent graphics performance for the associated games on the computer (Pong, Minecraft and Snake), the most important of which is Minecraft (at least in my daughter’s eyes). She settled in to start playing and completely ignored the optional screen at the bottom that would let her make her own tools and showed the code that generated them. I think it’s a feature she would embrace over time, but she hasn’t had much chance to play with the Kano yet.

She still tends to gravitate toward Minecraft on my iPad, where she has an entire world filled with houses, a glass-box zoo and apparently a new problem with raging forest fires. But we’re coming back to the Kano this weekend, and it’s possible I’ll do a follow on review when she’s spent more time with the system. You can browse the internet via the open source Chromium browser, check YouTube videos and install LibreOffice for word processing, but I’m still not sure this is a good substitute for my third grader when compared to a basic laptop.

The upshot is, this is an expensive but fun project that might get your kid into computing and coding, or even just get them off your iPad for playing Minecraft. I think for a kid interested in coding, or in delving deeper into the games, it will be an awesome springboard into more complicated coding adventures. But it also does a nice job of letting the kids pick up on that at their own pace and interest level. I probably will buy one for my daughter’s Christmas present after I ship the review unit back, even if she’s only middlingly enthusiastic about it for now. With kids, you never know when their interest might come alive, and this seems like a good tool to encourage it if it does.

]]>ARM, the chip design firm whose processor designs are in almost all of the world’s smartphones, is beefing up its portfolio for the internet of things. The UK-based company has launched a new core called the Cortex-M7, a microcontroller that adds more performance and more abilities when it comes to translating sensor data into digital information. Microcontrollers are used in the embedded market and run lower-level operating systems, while the higher-level A-class of ARM processors are both faster and also can run OSes such as Linux, Android or iOS.

The new core design joins the existing microcontroller designs that range from the smallest, lowest energy cores found in devices like the Misfit Shine to the higher-level microcontrollers found inside cars and home hubs. The Cortex-M7 core is already in semiconductors from STMicroelectronics, Atmel and Freescale and Nandan Nayampally, VP of marketing, application processor systems for ARM, expects the design to do well in both the automotive and industrial settings where real-time information processing at lower power is essential.

ARM only offers 32-bit microcontrollers, and both the M-4 and M-7 designs include a digital signal processor capability allowing them to play sound and interpret analog sensor data. This makes them valuable in audio components and also in sensor hubs. The M-7 offers roughly twice the performance at its current process node, but will offer more with less of a power hit as it’s made on smaller and smaller manufacturing processes.

Again, these aren’t designed to run a cell phone or even a car’s telematics system, but it’s perfect for industrial gateways and certain smart home applications.

]]>Samsung, ARM, Nest and four other companies have gotten together to build a new radio standard for the smart home. Dubbed Thread, it is a low-power, mesh network protocol that also supports IPv6. The standard is built on the existing radio hardware used by ZigBee devices (802.15.4), which means that a company could update its ZigBee devices to support Thread with software if it chooses.

So does the smart home need a new networking protocol? I think “need” may be a little strong, but there’s certainly a lot of appeal in designing a radio protocol from the ground up. And outside of the companies above, Freescale, Silicon Labs, Yale Security and Big Ass Fans also agreed. Chris Boross from Nest Labs, who is involved in the Thread Group, ran through the issues associated with other radio technologies during an interview Monday.

What’s the matter with Wi-Fi?

According to Boross, Wi-Fi is both power hungry and made for big data while Z-wave is controlled by one company. Bluetooth is low-power, but while the standard is being tweaked to accommodate a more mesh-like structure, it’s not a true mesh network. It also doesn’t yet support IPv6 in the real-world implementations but the specification does allow for it. ZigBee has a range of issues, but suffers in part because it has so many variations that the standard is not as standardized as consumers would like.

To address these perceived flaws and others, the Thread networking protocol supports IPv6 using 6LoWPAN, which is a way to adapt the heavier IPv6 capability for a power-and-packet constrained network. It also can support a mesh network of 250 devices or more. This may seem like overkill, but if you tally every light bulb in your home, every outlet, every switch and then start adding sensors and fun devices, that number starts making sense.

A Big Ass Fan that could one day include Thread.

There are two challenges associated with getting a new radio standard into the mass market — even if it’s a software upgrade to an existing radio found on plenty of existing devices. The first is convincing device makers to put an 802.15.4 chip inside everything from a phone to a hub and the second is making sure the standard is really a standard.

You gotta make them love you!

To solve the first problem, using existing radio hardware is a good first step. It’s a lot easier to convince device manufacturers to send a software upgrade to add Thread support to existing ZigBee stuff than it is to convince them to add a new radio. But Thread does have an issue in that so far, ZigBee isn’t popular on tablets or phones, which are the dominant means of controlling a smart home today.

Luckily most hubs on the market have ZigBee radios and service providers such as Comcast are even embedding ZigBee into their set-top boxes. So while, at first you might need a hub or gateway of some sort to control your thread devices, if it becomes popular, then perhaps Samsung, Apple, Asus or another phone or tablet manufacturer adds a new radio. Boross declined to comment on Samsung’s plans for thread, although it could push adoption with the addition of a thread radio in all of its phones.

As for the second problem of creating a true standard, the Thread Group is taking a page from Bluetooth and Wi-Fi. Much as the Wi-Fi Alliance certifies all Wi-Fi devices, the Thread Group plans to provide similar rigorous testing, certification and enforcement. ZigBee actually lost ground with device makers because it fragmented its standard so much that the devices weren’t actually interoperable. It’s trying to repair that damage now, but it still has two versions of ZigBee for the consumer and pro markets.

Finally, for those confused about how Thread might fit into the bigger picture, this is a radio effort, so things like HomeKit, Nest’s Developer program and even Qualcomm’s AllJoyn would work on top of Thread. The goal here is to supplant Wi-Fi and Bluetooth as the de facto standards for the smart home.

What are the odds?

Today, the Nest thermostat is running a version of Thread, and later this year the spec will be defined enough that other manufacturers could start building Thread-based products. Boross said that the thread Group will start certifying devices in mid-2015, which means that while companies may support thread and build it into their products, there won’t be certified devices until the middle of next year.

Thread inside.

Will this succeed? It’s tough to say. In may ways this will add to consumer confusion, and there are smart people at many chip companies that make Wi-Fi and Bluetooth chips trying to tweak the radios for more efficiency in the smart home. That being said, connected devices do behave differently from laptops or phones, and building a radio specification optimized for those devices — especially when we’re anticipating so many of them isn’t crazy.

The Thread backers have done what they can to mitigate the risks that new radio specifications face and certainly have a lot of marketing product muscle. I’ll be eager to see the first devices to get the Thread seal of approval. If we see hubs and vendors like GreenPeak, which sells ZigBee chips into set-top boxes, then this Thread protocol might lead us to a better connected home network.

]]>Three computer makers have decided to combine Nvidia graphics processors with ARM-based CPU cores for high performance computing — a first for the ARM architecture that has so far dominated the cell phone market. Cirrascale (pictured above), E4 and Eurotech are all building machines that will use the Applied Micro X-Gene boards in conjunction with a nearby GPU to handle the types of performance-heavy workloads popular in the oil and gas, scientific and industrial design industries.

Nvidia has opened up its CUDA code that lets developers compile their code to run on GPUs as a means to get ARM cores into the HPC sector. The combination of a GPU and an Intel x86 processor has become more common in supercomputing, in part because GPUs can do more work per watt than an x86 processor. As supercomputers grow in performance, they are also sucking up far too much energy, leading experts in the field to become worried that the next generation of machines will require too much power to be feasible.

And since ARM cores are as low power as they come, the idea is that replacing the Intel or AMD cores using the x86 architecture with something using ARM, would help cut down on power consumption. While it may seem far-fetched, the rise of 64-bit capable ARM processors hitting the market this year means that the HPC market could become a possibility. People in the HPC world are assessing ARM already.

Pat McCormick, senior scientist at Los Alamos National Laboratory was quoted in the release announcing the creation of ARM-based machines as saying, “We are working with Nvidia to explore how we can unite GPU acceleration with novel technologies like ARM to drive new levels of scientific discovery and innovation.”

Bringing an ARM-Nvidia duo into the HPC market isn’t as crazy as one might think. Nvidia has been pushing hard in a variety of computing realms, from cell phones to enterprise as a way to broaden its market and take on computing jobs that the x86 architecture can’t do as efficiently. Like ARM, it is hoping to ride the trend of workload-specific hardware into more markets that were once owned by Intel’s x86 architecture. It only makes sense that the two architectures would team up to take on a lucrative sector that is currently limited by power consumption.

]]>To meet the needs of webscale and select enterprise customers Intel will build a customizable and programmable CPU that combines an Intel processor and a programmable chip from an undisclosed partner, Diane Bryant, SVP and General Manger of Intel’s data center group, plans to announce onstage at the Gigaom Structure conference Wednesday. Bryant said the customizable CPU is already in development, and would be used in production environments next year.

“We have been engaging directly with large-scale service providers to give them exactly what they need,” said Bryant.

The chip would combine a Xeon processor and a programmable chip known as an FPGA, or a field-programmable gate array. Instead of just placing the FPGA near the chip, which is the usual way one would place an FPGA or other accelerator chip, the two would be linked and able to share access to the memory available to the CPU. This coherency is essential for making the processors faster and avoiding bottlenecks associated with using other accelerators such as graphics processors or even an FPGA that isn’t coherently linked.

The primary companies making FPGAs are Xilinx, Altera and Latice Semiconductor, but Bryant didn’t say what firm it was working with for the FPGA, only that Intel wasn’t designing those itself. However Intel will test and manufacture the entire chip for customers.

If this sounds familiar, it’s because just this week Microsoft said it was using a similar Xeon and FPGA option in its data centers to process search queries at a faster rate. When asked if Microsoft was using Intel’s new chip, Bryant said she couldn’t comment. However, this type of customizable silicon would be beneficial across a variety of use cases, from translating search algorithms to compression of genetic data.

The benefit of using FPGAs, which tend to be costly, is that they are able to be programmed to run a specific set of algorithms at peak efficiency and can later be re-programmed as the algorithms or work changes. As noted in Monday’s post about Microsoft’s efforts, the greater efficiency and agility is something many webscale clients have been willing to pay for, even looking to other alternative processor architectures in order to gain it.

So in many ways, Intel’s decision to bring on an FPGA is a signal that the x86 architecture needed some goosing, especially as other alternative architectures start gaining interest from the Facebooks and Googles of the world that are Intel’s top clients. As alternatives go, the ARM architecture, which is the underlying architecture in the brains of most cell phones, has been seen as the one most likely to give Intel a run for its money.

“I’m not naive to the fact to that people are looking at a second source,” said Bryant. “With a new tech option I would absolutely expect that customers will be evaluating that solution.”

Chipmakers from AMD to Marvell have designed server chips using the ARM architecture praising its modularity and the ability to create what amounts to custom chips aimed at specific compute jobs. But with this FPGA option Intel may have just taken that modularity advantage away. It’s still too soon to tell as ARM chips are just now making their way into servers this year, but I’ll be intrigued to see if the Intel FPGA strategy turns into a stopgap measure to keep big clients happy and away from ARM or if it is a truly new philosophy and approach for Intel.

Bryant also plans to share several other pieces of news, including the anticipated launch next month of a new Hadoop distribution that will combine Intel’s code with that of Cloudera, a company that Intel recently put millions into. The new release will merge the Rhino and Century open source security standards as well as stabilize Spark on Yarn. Spark is the open source data-processing framework that is becoming very popular because it’s much faster than traditional Hadoop MapReduce (and therefore better for certain applications such as machine learning and interactive SQ queries) and easier to program. YARN is resource-management layer now standard in Apache Hadoop that lets a single cluster run multiple types of workloads — such as Spark, MapReduce and the Storm stream-processing engine, for example — simultaneously.

]]>Microsoft expects to cut the number of servers associated with its Bing search queries in half thanks to custom-designed programmable chips working in conjunction with Intel’s Xeon processors. The Redmond, Washington, software giant has designed field-programmable gate arrays, or FPGAs, that it hopes to use to speed up Bing searches and plans to put them in production soon, according to a story in Wired.

The story highlights Project Catapult, a network of machines that Microsoft’s Research team is building to process Microsoft’s search algorithms that help determine what pages to list based on your search query. They are being tested now, but Microsoft expects to use them to handle your actual search queries next year. From the story:

Using FPGAs, Microsoft engineers are building a kind of super-search machine network they call Catapult. It’s comprised of 1,632 servers, each one with an Intel Xeon processor and a daughter card that contains the Altera FPGA chip, linked to the Catapault network. The system takes search queries coming from Bing and offloads a lot of the work to the FPGAs, which are custom-programmed for the heavy computational work needed to figure out which webpages results should be displayed in which order. Because Microsoft’s search algorithms require such a mammoth amount of processing, Catapult can bundle the FPGAs into mini-networks of eight chips.

Like some of the custom chips designed for mining Bitcoins, the key to the FPGAs, which are expensive, is that they can be programmed to do one set of tasks extremely well. And if that task is a large enough consumer of compute power, like mining Bitcoins or crunching search algorithms, then designing a highly specialized processor to do it can pay off. It’s counterintuitive if we’re viewing the world from the old-school enterprise IT framework where the computers had to run many apps well because each enterprise had to support a stable of of them. Only, now there’s a twofold shift that changes how big computing customers view their hardware.

The first is that large webscale providers can segment workloads and thus develop specialized hardware for specific apps spread across a variety of users. The second is that these companies provide the infrastructure as a service, which means the cost of computing is the primary cost of their business. Thus, the incentive to invest in capital-intensive products to improve their bottom line can pay off in a big way.

For example, it can cut the number of servers and associated costs of running search inquiries. According to Doug Burger, the Microsoft Research employee quoted in the Wired story, the the FPGAs are 40 times faster than a generic Xeon CPU when it comes to running Microsoft’s algorithms. While that won’t lead to a an equivalent reduction in time to deliver results or even in terms of machines to process those results, he does think it could cut the number of servers needed in half. And every server you cut means a reduction in the cost of powering that server and a similar reduction in cost of cooling that server — a big deal across millions of servers.

That explains why Microsoft, and other webscale giants from Amazon to Google are investigating different chip architectures for their servers. And Microsoft’s decision to test FPGAs is doubly interesting because they can actually be re-programmed when the company’s algorithms change, making them a costly, but flexible option. And if there’s one thing we know about the cloud, it’s that flexibility trumps cost.

This may be a problem for Intel, which isn’t losing a customer, but is losing out if using FPGAs means Microsoft buys half the number of servers (and the Xeon chips inside them). But Intel is also doing its best to design custom chips in response to the needs of its webscale clients such as eBay, so perhaps it will offer a tweaked design that either offers better performance with the FPGA at a higher margin or ends up eventually supplanting them. We can ask Diane Bryant, senior vice president and general manager of the Data Center Group for Intel, at our Structure event this week.